Digital Overtone

“Inevitable que una parte de su obra fuese una reflexión sobre el problema de escribirla.”
(”Inevitable that a part of his work be a reflexion on the problem of writing it.”) (Fragment 99)
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“Para que sirve un escritor si no para destruir la literatura?”
(”What is a writer good for if not to destroy literature?”) (Fragment 99)

The first time I attempted to read Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela¹, some years ago and for pleasure, I gave up a little over halfway through. My difficulty was not predicated on that fact that it was a difficult text–it is–, but rather on the fact that I was convinced that it had no literary value whatsoever. The book was a disaster, a bricolage of tenuously related scenes involving a set of bohemian characters living in France but rejecting outright everything traditionally characterized as French, living off the fumes of defunct or stillborn philosophies, alcohol, jazz records, and false erudition. While the premise is tantalizing, the novel itself was plotless, disconnected, stagnant. A year ago, feeling reticent about dismissing so emphatically one of the premier modernist novels to be come out of Latin America, I reluctantly took it with me on an extended trip to Mexico, where I read it twice in a week and a half². It has since become one of my favorite novels.

Rayuela is in fact very intricately constructed, almost obsessively disparate, full of disjunct and loosely connected events and literary paraphernalia that describe, among other things, the mistrust and destabilization of the very language used to write it. This fundamental paradox is brought to bear in a structure that is deeply auto-referential in such a way that its auto-referentiality becomes a self-generative mise-en-abyme, in which the frame story (the auto-referential text) actually generates itself (it is a novel that is on many levels about writing a novel) while at the same time degenerating–denigrating–the language of which it is comprised. Only extremes are possible within these bounds in which everything is simultaneously its opposite (the rallying call of modernism): the novel writes its own unwriting; every foundation is an unfounding; every beginning is its own ending.

But the novel is not permitted to end. The characters in Rayuela are deeply distrustful of anything final and finished. Words have lost their meaning; conventions, those rites that provide a consistent definition of social reality, are toppled and replaced by nothing; the very value of literature and literariness are called into question. Morelli, the cult author obsession of Oliveira and his companions, is “repelled by literary language” (fragment 112). La Maga attempts early on to explain her philosophy to Oliveira but words are insufficient, too simplistic, and her attempt becomes amusingly convoluted and caricaturesque:

Vos sos como un testigo, sos el que va al museo y mira los cuadros. Quiero decir que los cuadros están ahí y vos en el museo, cerca y lejos al mismo tiempo. Yo soy un cuadro. […] Esta pieza es un cuadro. Vos creés que estás en esta pieza pero no estás. Vos estás mirando la pieza, no estás en la pieza³. (Fragmento 3)

Later, she coldly recounts the story of her rape with words utterly detached from any emotional history. Oliveira begins to systematically add the letter “h” (silent in Spanish) to the beginning of any word that begins with a vowel, as if attempting to renovate (etymologically “to make new again”) a language that is no longer sufficient to explain anything, but is the only option at his disposal short of complete hermetization (”Heste Holiveira siempre con sus hejemplos⁴“, Fragment 84). In fragment 34, as Oliveira reads a novel by Galdós, we find his thoughts alternating, line by line, with the text of the novel. Glíglico⁵ and hispamerikano undo the very foundations of language, divorcing the sign from the signifier and the word from its spelling.

At the same time, the creative power of language is profoundly reaffirmed, perhaps most famously thus:

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo […] y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja⁶. (Fragmento 7)

It is through the power of language, of story-telling, the physical act of language, that Oliveira will recover his lost lover la Maga. It is through the destabilization of that language that every ending will be a beginning, an eternal “begin anew” (recomenzar). The premise is revolutionary: How do you approach a novel that seeks to destabilize, even to negate, not only its value as literature, but the very force that drives its composition?

Rayuela seems to find a equally radical solution: it never begins. The entire novel–what I once (mis)read as a stagnant plot–is a constant beginning that never is quite consummated, for once it began it would perforce have to end. There is no middle ground, and every act is pregnant with its opposite. The novel can degrade and renew language in the same gesture (the two acts are, indeed, inseparable⁷). The loss of la Maga is the real end of this novel, and “coincides exactly”, and quite literally, with the beginning, with the postulation of her recuperation through the amazing generative power of language. ¿Encontraría a la Maga?⁸ is as much admission of loss as it is a vow to remember, to recuperate, to recreate through an act of language. To begin anew is, ultimately, to lose again; to lose again is, ultimately, to begin anew.

In a way, Rayuela is the perfect novel with which to re-inaugurate the new Digital Overtone.

Footnotes

1. Rayuela translates literally to “Hopscotch” in English. ↩
2. In Rayuela Julio Cortázar actually proposes two different strategies for reading the novel, while implicitly rejecting the reader’s option to read in both ways. The novel is divided into three sections: El lado de allá (That Side), set in Paris; El lado de acá (This Side), set in Argentina, and Capítulos prescindibles (Expendable Chapters), a collection of fragments ranging from scenes involving the central characters to philosophical writings by a cult author to newspaper clippings. The first method for reading involves reading fragments 1-56–which comprise El lado de allá and El lado de acá and stopping without reading any of the later fragments. The second method was to begin with fragment 73 and figuratively playing hopscotch, jumping from one fragment to another following a table provided by the author. I cheated and read both ways (the second reading was far superior). ↩
3. “You are like a witness, you’re the one who goes to the museum and looks at the pictures. What I mean to say is that the paintings are there and you’re in the museum, near and far at the same time. I am a painting. […] This flat is a painting. You think you’re in this flat, but you’re not. You’re looking at the flat, you’re not in the flat.” (Fragment 3) ↩
4. “That Holiveira and his examples“. Also, in Fragment 90, hasunto (subject), hencrucijada (crossroads), hunidad (unity), hego (ego) and hotro (other), all highly charged words. ↩
5. “Apenas él le amalaba el noema, a ella se le agolpaba el clésimo y caían en hidromurias, en salvajes ambonios, en sustalos exasperantes” (fragment 68). Oliveira and la Maga make love with an invented language, in which words mean nothing more than what they sound like. This entire fragment is frankly untranslatable. ↩
6. “I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as though it sprang forth from my hand, as if your mouth opened slightly for the first time, and it is enough to close my eyes to undo it all and begin anew, each time I make the mouth that I desire […] and that by some chance I don’t seek to understand coincides exactly with the mouth that smiles beneath the one my hand draws on you.” (Fragment 7) ↩
7. Bakhtin would agree, I think. More on him later. ↩
8. The famous first line of the novel translates alternately as “Would I find la Maga” or “Did I find la Maga“, in the sense of “I wonder if I found la Maga“. I would live in perpetual dread of this sentence if I were a translator. ↩

Posted by Kyle / criticism and fiction and literature